Promise-ary Note: Fashion Foibles - Picture Post

The "uniform"

This is how I normally look.  Casual jeans, t-shirt, fleece jacket (hat is optional).

These are some of the looks I tried out this week.

Super layered hot box.

When I was working with casual free time looks, I tried the layered look.  Overdid it by about two layers.  Undershirt, t-shirt, button up, hoodie, sport coat = sweat shop for this kid.  It seems like whenever I look at fashion magazines (which is not often) the models are always layered.  When I talked to my fashion expert, Celina, she told me to lose the frat boy hoodie under the jacket and to try for something a little more age appropriate.  My friend Celina is a model in the big NYC, so she got tapped to serve as my fashion consultant.  I want to thank her for her patience as I sent her an inappropriate amount of selfies this week.

As I thought about how I was going to pull of "dressing up" for the bar, Celina sent me this picture as a suggestion.

Image Source

Here's my versions of the look without necessarily adhering to the original.  I liked this look.  It almost reminded me of old-time bartenders with the arm garters.

Mirror selfies.  Really?  Super awkward!

The one interesting thing that resulted from dressing up at the bar is the customer reaction I got.  I had a couple of people thank me for my professionalism, and some regulars comment on how good I looked.  One guy, a business traveler who travels all the time, said it was nice to have a "pro behind the bar" because he himself was a "pro."  While I take all of these comments with a grain of salt, there was something happening outside the norm.  People were responding to me in odd ways.  I had a TON of people shake my hand on the way out the door, something that is outside my normal routine.

Dressing up was changing the way I was treated, and it was changing the way I felt about myself.  Sometimes I feel like I'll get caught in a situation where I'll be woefully under-dressed.  Much of this is because I've been in that situation before and found it uncomfortable.  When I dress up, I don't get caught in that situation.  Instead of feeling stuffy and uncomfortable, I found the opposite to be true.  This surprised me a lot.

In terms of office work, I found a new sport coat at a Goodwill by my house.  It's the one pictured above, but I used it to dress up for school too, which was a good thing as I had an informal meeting with fellow faculty.

Shea and I in our school "uniforms."

I found myself shopping more and more over the course of the week, looking for a way to transform casual into something that went beyond shorts and a t-shirt (the weather was in the mid-80s).  Something that would take me from around town to an informal dinner without feeling under-dressed.  In my exchanges with my fashion expert, Celina, my friend who models in NYC, I found out that socks are a no-no with casual shoes, and she pointed me in the direction of some simple shirts that can work for me.  The end result looked like this...

Finished casual

None of these things are going to set the fashion world ablaze, but they did help me make some changes that felt substantial to the way I dress.  On the way to work today, I had an epiphany about this whole process.  I'm dressing my age.  Not only that, but I'm dressing how I feel more.  I'm slowly abandoning clothes that are part of the younger me, a man I no longer am, and working toward a look that feels natural for where I am now in my life.

It was one of those epiphanies that actually cascaded further into all kinds of other ideas about the self, about my work, about what is the job and what is the career, and a solidification of a creative idea for a writing project that I think I can tackle now.

It's all appearances.  It's all fashion and fickle, but it is also more than that.  It is the way an individual conceives of himself.  It is not just how I appear to others, but how I feel about myself.

This post was actually one of the hardest ones I've had to write in a while because there were so many things that linked into it.  So many different directions I could have taken it.  That's probably why this post feels so incomplete and scattered to me now.  I might have to revisit this topic a couple of times in order to tease out all the threads the grew from it, but that's something I'll have to save for a later date.

In the meantime, here's the next promise.  This one scares me a bit for a lot of different reasons, but I'll log that in later.